Scientists Invent Self-Healing Computer Chips That Repair Themselves

Great, the evil supercomputers in our future now will be able to immediately heal themselves if you attempt to damage their circuits, Phys.org reports:

Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from low battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.

In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser, and then observed as the chips automatically developed a work-around in less than a second.

By showing that the self-healing capability works well in such an advanced system, the researchers hope to show that the self-healing approach can be extended to virtually any other electronic system.

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Is Disinfo misidentifying redundant circuitry as self-healing? The primary article says the chips find a workaround; it doesn’t state that the damaged circuitry is actually repaired. Therefore this article seems like sensationalist garbage. Whatever gets clicks, right?

zwagbog

They just copied… Check the Phys.org URL.

http://www.ContraControl.com/ Zenc

From my brief skim of the original paper, it seems they have integrated cybernetic control circuits along with a set of power amplifier circuits.

The cybernetic controller can modify inputs, outputs, component recruitment, etc in order to optimize chip operations in the face of changing internal and external variables. One of the variables it can compensate for (and likely the most interesting) is damage to some of the power amplifier circuitry and components.